It’s high noon at the Columbia Tower Club on the 75th floor of
downtown’s tallest building, and a dozen ladies are gathered around a
dark wood table in a room with an expansive view of the freeway. The
occasion for this awkwardly intimate gathering: a discussion (formerly
billed as a “talk”—at $47, the promoter apparently didn’t sell
many tickets) with Diane MacEachern, author of Big Green Purse: Use
Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener World.
While picking at chalky slabs of salmon and overdressed salads, the
women toss a volley of green-lifestyle questions at MacEachern. What
kind of lipstick should I buy? Should I buy my daughter a new car? How
do I know if the cosmetics industry is lying to me? MacEachern, a tiny,
well-coiffed woman in a lime-green quilted jacket and sensible black
pants, answers each question with a confident, beatific smile: one
without phthalates or other toxic chemicals; no; when a manufacturer
substantiates the claim with third-party verification. The women range
from about 19 years old to perhaps 55, although most are
closer to the latter.
Two things struck me as I listened to the lengthy
question-and-answer session. One: I am completely out of touch with
what upper-middle-class American women care about. Listening to
MacEachern’s advice that women take one “day off” each week from using
makeup (one-quarter of American women use 15 different products on
their faces and bodies every day), my main thought was,
there’s no way any of these women are going to take five
minutes off from makeup. And give up their cars? Forget
it—most of the women met each other in the parking garage.
The second, and related, thought, is: Holy fuck, we have a long way
to go. As lunch began, MacEachern went around the table and asked
everyone to name one thing they’d done to be “a little greener” in the
past week. One had taken the bus from her home on the Eastside to a
show downtown last month; another had decided to go to an “eco-resort”
for her next vacation (she’d considered a more rustic destination, but
“you want to be pampered”). When my lunch companion mentioned we’d
walked downtown, heads nodded in earnest admiration.
In Big Green Purse, MacEachern does suggest things like
taking the bus, of course; but she does it with a kind of wink-wink
complicity that says, “Obviously, I’m not suggesting you do anything
crazy. If you want to just, you know, keep your tires
inflated, that’s good too.” It’s a point she emphasized repeatedly at
the Columbia Tower Club, telling the ladies over and over, “You don’t
have to be perfect; just be a little better.”
And her book is full of little suggestions for doing just that.
Don’t buy fruit already diced and packaged in plastic tubs. Toss your
condoms in the trash, not the toilet. Buy a small or hybrid car, and
write a letter to car companies urging them to make more “ecofriendly”
cars. And (my personal favorite), buy clothes made from organic cotton
and bamboo. “The organic chemise we buy today can convince a grower to
switch to organic farming tomorrow,” MacEachern breezes.
It’s true, of course, that buying quality stuff is better than
buying total crap. And nearly everyone could stand to drive a little
less, buy a few products organically, ask companies to send them fewer
catalogs, and use energy-saving power strips. The problem is that
suggestions like these, while useful, don’t add up to the kind of
greenhouse-gas reductions we need to avoid cooking the planet in the
next few years. And the fact that that’s the goal we should be aiming
for—slow greenhouse-gas emissions, slow climate change—gets
a little lost in MacEachern’s Hints from Heloise approach to living a
“cleaner, greener” existence. Just be a little better—drive a
little less, use a little less stuff—and everything’s going to be
okay. The implication seems to be that somebody has to
sacrifice—but not you.
I’m not denigrating the impact of a “thousand little
steps”—given how far we are from where we need to be, even little
steps help, a little. It’s just that we need to take all those steps,
plus ten thousand more. And that gets to the heart of why green
consumerism of the kind espoused in MacEachern’s book doesn’t
work—because, when all is said and done, if we keep consuming at
anything like our current rate, we’re going to consume the planet.
